A scientific consensus has emerged among top mainstream climate scientists that “skeptics” or “lukewarmers” were not long ago derided for suggesting — there was a nearly two-decade long “hiatus” in global warming that climate models failed to accurately predict or replicate.

A new paper, led by climate scientist Benjamin Santer, adds to the ever-expanding volume of “hiatus” literature embracing popular arguments advanced by skeptics, and even uses satellite temperature datasets to show reduced atmospheric warming.

Figure 1: Time series and difference series of simulated and observed tropospheric temperature.More importantly, the paper discusses the failure of climate models to predict or replicate the “slowdown” in early 21st century global temperatures, which was another oft-derided skeptic observation.

“In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble,” reads the abstract of Santer’s paper, which was published Monday.

“Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed,” reads the abstract, adding that “model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.”

The paper caught some prominent critics of global climate models by surprise. Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. tweeted “WOW!” after he read the abstract, which concedes “model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed” for most of the early 21st Century.

Santer recently co-authored a separate paper that purported to debunk statements EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made that global warming had “leveled off.” But Santer’s paper only evaluated a selectively-edited and out-of-context portion of Pruitt’s statement by removing the term “hiatus.”

Moreover, climate scientists mocked Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for talking about the global warming “hiatus” during a 2015 congressional hearing. Instead, activist scientists worked hard to airbrush the global warming slowdown from data records and advance media claim that it was a “myth.”

Santer and Carl Mears, who operate the Remote Sensing System satellite temperature dataset, authored a lengthy blog post in 2016 critical of Cruz’s contention there was an 18-year “hiatus” in warming that climate models didn’t predict.

They argued “examining one individual 18-year period is poor statistical practice, and of limited usefulness” when evaluating global warming.

“Don’t cherry-pick; look at all the evidence, not just the carefully selected evidence that supports a particular point of view,” Santers and Mears concluded.

Cruz’s hearing, of course, was the same year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its “pause-busting” study. The study by lead author Tom Karl purported to eliminate the “hiatus” from the global surface temperature record by adjusting ocean data upwards to correct for “biases” in the data.

Democrats and environmentalists praised Karl’s work, which came out before the Obama administration unveiled its carbon dioxide regulations for power plants. Karl’s study also came out months before U.N. delegates hashed out the Paris agreement on climate change.

Karl’s study was “verified” in 2016 in a paper led by University of California-Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, but even then there were lingering doubts among climate scientists.

Then, in early 2016, mainstream scientists admitted the climate model trends did not match observations — a coup for scientists like Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger who have been pointing out flaws in model predictions for years.John Christy, who collects satellite temperature data out of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, has testified before Congress on the failure of models to predict recent global warming.

Christy’s research has shown climate models show 2.5 times more warming in the bulk atmosphere than satellites and weather balloons have observed.Now, he and Santer seem to be on the same page — the global warming “hiatus” is real and the models didn’t see it coming.

Santer’s paper argues the “hiatus” or “slowdown” in warming “has provided the scientific community with a valuable opportunity to advance understanding” of the climate system and how to model it.

In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble. Because observations and coupled model simulations do not have the same phasing of natural internal variability, such decadal differences in simulated and observed warming rates invariably occur. Here we analyse global-mean tropospheric temperatures from satellites and climate model simulations to examine whether warming rate differences over the satellite era can be explained by internal climate variability alone. We find that in the last two decades of the twentieth century, differences between modelled and observed tropospheric temperature trends are broadly consistent with internal variability. Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed; warming rate differences are generally outside the range of trends arising from internal variability. The probability that multi-decadal internal variability fully explains the asymmetry between the late twentieth and early twenty-first century results is low (between zero and about 9%). It is also unlikely that this asymmetry is due to the combined effects of internal variability and a model error in climate sensitivity. We conclude that model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.

3) David Whitehouse: The 'Hiatus' In Global Warming Is The Hottest Topic In Climate Science Right Now, Whether Alarmists Like It Or NotFinancial Post, 23 June 2017

The global warming ‘hiatus’ is the most talked about and researched topic in climate science

Few things illustrate the poor state of the communication of climate science better than the reaction to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s comments about global temperatures in the past 20 years. It was made in written comments to the Senate following his confirmation hearing. He wrote, “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming.” Has the temperature increase of the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere “stalled” in the past 20 years or so? Does this change our view of climate change?

Condemnation of these comments was swift. A study was quickly put together for the journal Nature Scientific Reports to disprove Pruitt’s comments. It looked at satellite measurements of the temperature of the atmosphere close to the ground back to when such data first became available in 1979. It concluded that Pruitt was wrong and many media outlets reported that conclusion.

But had reporters looked a little deeper into the data, and talked to more scientists, they would have uncovered a far more fascinating story more in keeping with the way science actually works, as climate scientists attempt to decipher real-world climate data. They would have discovered that Pruitt has a point: The world’s surface has not been warming as expected in the past two decades. A great many scientists accept what the data are saying and are seeking to explain it. Others are sure there has been no slowdown, but the problem is they are often not even-handed in their analysis.

The Nature Scientific Reports study reached its erroneous conclusion by considering short-term natural fluctuations to be part of long-term global warming. We have just experienced a few years of strongly elevated global surface and lower atmospheric temperatures due to an El Nino.

El Ninos are natural quasi-periodic events originating in the equatorial Pacific that have worldwide consequences. This is not global warming. However, its elevated temperatures at the end of a temperature-data set skews estimates of how much long-term warming is taking place, making it seem more dramatic than it actually is. Taking this into account, and not assuming that the global temperature increase since 1979 has been constant at the same rate, allows the remarkable stability of the lower tropospheric temperature, and the surface temperature as measured by weather stations and ocean buoys, to become apparent.

Although many prominent climate scientists will not countenance its existence, the so-called “hiatus” is the most talked about and researched topic in climate science. It is a significant mystery for which there have been many explanations proposed with a growing suspicion that perhaps the oceans are involved in some way.

Writing in the journal Nature recently, Gerald Meehl, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the many adjustments of the surface temperature data sets — adjustments that invariably eliminate the hiatus — have not been as definitive as some suggest. He says the claims of “no hiatus” rest on questionable interpretations of forced climate change due to greenhouse gasses and their relationship with inter-decadal and decadal natural climate variability. The hiatus is clear, he says, and not an artifact of the data.

This means that in the past 20 years or so the anthropogenic warming signal is being obscured by decadal climatic variability and it could be several decades before man’s influence emerged and exceeded nature. As the journal Nature Climate Change said recently, “Longer-term externally forced trends in global mean surface temperatures are embedded in the background noise of internally generated multidecadal variability.” Pruitt’s comments recognize that.

Some are adamant that the “hiatus” does not and never has existed, and will never change their minds. But the evidence is irrefutable. As a large number of influential climate scientists have just said in the journal Nature Geoscience, since the turn of the century there has been a substantial slowdown in warming that computer climate models did not predict or can explain. In fact, such models predict a warming twice that observed. This confirms what Pruitt has said. If anyone tells you that the science is settled tell them that this is just the start of climate science and not its end.

Some scientists and campaigners may find it inconvenient and uncomfortable but the EPA’s Pruitt has a point backed-up by science.

David Whitehouse is a writer and broadcaster, and science editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Due to Brexit and other new commitments, the EU will soon be short of € 25 billion. As a new source of revenue, EU Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger is proposing to introduce a EU-wide CO2 tax. Germany could be a beneficiary.

As a result of Brexit and because of many new tasks the EU budget will be missing € 25 billion. EU Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger, therefore, wants to introduce new revenues for the EU in form of a climate tax. In addition, he wants to take Brexit as an opportunity to remove not only Britain’s EU rebate but similar discounts for other EU member states.

“When the British leave, the rebate negotiated by Maggie Thatcher falls away; I want to use this opportunity to cancel all discounts, including those for Denmark and Germany,” Oettinger told SPIEGEL. “After the departure of the British, we are likely to be short of at least € 10 billion a year,” he said. “I can imagine that half of this sum can be saved, and the remaining members will divide the other half among themselves,” the EU Commissioner said. Germany, for example, receives a discount on the additional costs incurred as a result of the British discount.

But it’s not just Brexit that is causing a hole in the EU budget. EU members states are facing many new tasks such as in defense, development aid or the safeguarding of external borders. The additional financial requirement of these new commitments is estimated to be 15 billion euros. This is why Oettinger intends to present a discussion paper on the future financing of the EU next Wednesday which will include proposed cuts in existing funding programmes. Apparently, cuts in the agricultural budget, which is still amounting to almost 40% of all EU spending, are being considered.

Oettinger also wants to open up new sources of income for the EU. To this end, EU member states are to transfer part of their tax revenues to Brussels. “One consideration is to use the topic of climate protection and to transfer the taxation of EU CO2 credits to the EU,” Oettinger said. “These CO2 credits are based on European legislation, but they have so far gone to member states.”

The advantages for the EU members are obvious, Oettinger said. “To date, Germany’s contributions to the EU come from the federal budget, but environmental taxes are paid by a steel producer from Luxembourg or by a chemical company from Rhineland-Palatinate, which would reduce the contribution from national budgets.”

In a Special Report published on June 14, 2017, investigators at Reuters uncovered the shocking fact that an American scientist, Dr. Aaron Blair, the Chairman of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) Monograph 112 on glyphosate, suppressed critically important science.

The hidden science in question is recent data from the Agricultural Health Study (AHS), the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on pesticide exposure in humans. Evidence shows that Dr. Blair withheld updated data from the study which evaluates the pesticide exposure of more than 50,000 farmers and their families. The updated data reinforces the study’s original conclusion in 2005 that there is no evidence linking glyphosate exposure to cancer incidence.

The AHS was led by scientists from the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), including Dr. Blair himself! Under oath, Blair admitted that had IARC considered the study, it likely would have changed its conclusion on glyphosate: “[the] data would have altered IARC’s analysis.” Even so, IARC told Reuters it will not reconsider its conclusions on glyphosate, which are out of step with every other world regulator that has studied glyphosate.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that Dr. Blair, as an author of the AHS, was aware that this updated data existed since 2013. Incredibly, he claimed that this critical data had not yet been published due to spacing constraints.

According to Reuters’ investigation, the data was not published in time because “there was too much to fit into one scientific paper.” Since IARC made its determination based, in part, on “limited evidence” of cancer in humans, this data would have been significant.

WHY THIS MATTERS

This bombshell revelation is important for three reasons:

It shows that IARC leaders do not abide by fundamental principles of science when forming conclusions, bringing into question the agency’s scientific integrity.

The fundamental tenets of a scientific approach are to identify a problem, form a hypothesis, objectively gather and analyze data, and come to a conclusion (whether one’s hypothesis is right or wrong) based on the analytical results.

The Reuters investigation shows that IARC, a World Health Organization (WHO)-affiliated entity, failed to honor a key scientific principle of objectivity in gathering and analyzing data.

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website atwww.thegwpf.com.

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